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One evening a few years back Trout Boy (not his real name) and I were in a canoe on a sort of remote trout pond in northern Maine during the pond’s annual drake hatch. The drakes, a large species of Mayfly, were popping up on the surface of the pond after a desperate dash from […]

I’m in love with a fish. It’s no secret. I don’t try to hide it. This affair has been going on for some time, since I was, I guess, twelve years old and saw my first brook trout. That trout had just opened its mouth to dine on a live worm, until recently a contented […]

…but in our operating systems. Or so the Immortal Bard might have written had he tapped out Julius Caesar on an iPad rather than scratching it out on parchment with a goose feather. I started thinking about defaults the other day as I sat in the estimable Rangeley Public Library (est. 1909, now on the […]

Little Pigeon Cove harbor, on Cape Ann, on the north shore of Massachusetts, was a virtual fish trap back in the day when there were actually fish to be trapped. The granite breakwater narrows the mouth of the harbor and schools of tinker mackerel, perhaps chased into the harbor by plundering stripers or blues, tended […]

Someone asked me why I, with my (possibly) over-the-top fondness of fishing, don’t become a Registered Maine Guide. I answered, as diplomatically as I could, “Are you nuts?” I can understand the question. My license plate is FLY CST, I have a coveted camp at Upper Dam, I have fished in countless rivers, streams, lakes […]

There comes a time in every angler’s season that persistent failure to catch fish brings the realization that trout season, at least the first half, is over. The first half begins at ice-out and ends sometime around Bastille Day, when the water is too warm for trout comfort and the hexagenia hatches peter out. The […]

A good friend who is a devout catch-and-release angler and expert fly tyer fishes with barbed hooks. I won’t use Doug Mawhinney’s name here, but he knows who I’m talking about. I use barbless hooks, or at least hooks with the barb squeezed down as flat as I can get it with the Leatherman Squirt® pliers […]

Simuliidae. If you feel the need to curse in an ancient language at the small black bugs that are hacksawing away at your flesh in the Maine woods at this season of the year, then Latin is your language and the Family Simuliidae is your target. You may be surprised, though not delighted, to learn […]

But it’s a temporary thing, only until I finish his latest book, Fish Won’t Let Me Sleep — Obsessions of a Lifelong Flyfisherman. Mr. Babb is one of the most entertaining writers in the fish-lit genre, and that’s saying a lot because ever since Dame Juliana Berners’s Treatyse of fysshynge wyth an Angle emerged in […]

In this part of Canada, due north of Fredericton, where the fabled Miramichi flows not gently past Doaktown, the year has two Novembers. They call one of them April, which is a cute trick but doesn’t fool anyone. Gray naked tree branches, gray leaden skies, temperatures either just below or, on nice days, just above […]